Spells & Starfire

"We received a Sending from Halaster," Gale began. The statement alone was enough to make Celeste wince.

Gale sat opposite her, one hand wrapped loosely around his whiskey glass, though she had noticed he had barely touched it—whether from restraint or distraction, she could not quite determine, and both possibilities unsettled her in slightly different ways. The fire cast shifting shadows across his face, accentuating the tension that had settled there since she entered the study, the careful, deliberate quality of a man who was guarding whatever patience he still possessed with considerable effort.

"A greeting," he continued. "Which, considering the source, should have informed me immediately that something was deeply wrong. Halaster does not send greetings. Not unless reality itself has become sufficiently concerned to prompt basic social courtesy."

Despite herself, Celeste's mouth twitched. Gale noticed and hiis expression darkened.

"A bag of beholder jerky for Tara."

The twitch became a smile. "Tara will be delighted."

"I am sure she will be." His voice carried all the warmth of a man discussing a particularly inconvenient plague outbreak. "That is not the point."

For a moment he said nothing, staring into the fire as though drawing from it whatever reserves of composure were still available to him. Then he leaned beside his chair and retrieved a small leather pouch, and Celeste knew what it was before it touched the table—the weight of it, the particular way it sat in his hand, gave it away entirely. When Gale set it between them, the sound was unmistakable: gold dragons striking wood with a heavy, deliberate clatter that seemed absurdly loud in the otherwise quiet room.

Her stomach sank with quiet efficiency. Slowly, Gale nudged the pouch toward her.

"I assume you recognize this."

Celeste did not answer immediately. She reached forward instead, loosening the drawstring and peering inside.

Gold dragons. A considerable number of them. Far more than anyone would reasonably send as a token of appreciation, and far more than anyone should casually attach to a Sending, which was not, as a general rule, a communication method that accommodated physical currency.

She closed her eyes briefly and exhaled through her nose.

Across from her, Gale watched every movement with the focused attention of a man cataloguing evidence.

"He thanked us," Gale said, "for your services."

The words were delivered with such extraordinary care that they carried considerably more weight than anger could have managed. Each syllable placed with the precision of someone who had decided, some hours ago, that control was the only thing still available to him and intended to maintain it regardless of what it cost.

For a long moment, neither of them spoke.

The fire crackled softly. Somewhere outside, distant waves broke against the towers foundation in their usual indifferent rhythm.

Celeste stared at the pouch. Gale stared at her.

Eventually she reached inside and lifted a single coin, turning it slowly between her fingers—not because she needed to examine it, but because it gave her hands something to do and her eyes somewhere to be that was not his face. It was a thin strategy and she was aware of its thinness even as she employed it.

It did not work.

"Kell." His voice was quiet. Far quieter than she would have preferred.

She lowered the coin and finally met his eyes.

"I would very much appreciate," he said, with the elaborate care of someone constructing a sentence around a very large and unstable object, "an explanation as to why the most dangerous archmage currently inhabiting this plane of existence appears to believe he owes my wife a substantial sum of money." A pause. His gaze drifted briefly toward the pouch, then returned to her. "And why he seems to regard this arrangement as entirely unremarkable."

Celeste opened her mouth.

Closed it.

Opened it again.

Nothing remotely adequate presented itself. No thoughts, no snark remarks. Celeste was painfully aware that tonight, of all nights, she would not get away.

Across from her, Gale leaned back slightly, studying her with the weary patience of a man who already suspected he was about to hear something alarming, and had arrived at a place of such comprehensive alarm that this particular development would simply need to find somewhere to sit with the others.

She recognized the expression. Had seen it across lecture halls and dinner tables and the quiet domesticity of a shared life. Professor Dekarios—the look he reserved for students who had somehow transformed a simple assignment into an administrative catastrophe requiring intervention at multiple institutional levels.

Celeste sighed and rubbed a hand slowly over her face.

"I dislike that expression."

"That is unfortunate."

"It suggests I am about to disappoint you."

Gale's eyebrow rose. Slowly. Dangerously.

"Celeste," he said, with a calmness that bordered on something considerably less calm, "I fear we moved some distance beyond disappointment as the primary concern several years ago."

The fire popped beside him. Neither of them looked away.

And for perhaps the first time that evening, Celeste began to suspect that explaining how she had spent the last years would prove even more difficult than living through them.

"Halaster's sending confirmed, quite by accident I might add," Gale stated, his gaze turning upon the dancing flames with an intensity that suggested he had been choosing these words for considerably longer than tonight, "what I had long suspected—and yet, despite my suspicions, had deliberately chosen not to believe: that you and he had conducted what he himself considered a rather surprising volume of business. Commercial transactions, to be rather more euphemistic about it than perhaps the situation warrants. And he was, I confess, quite exceptionally pleased with the quality and nature of the services you provide."

Celeste lowered her gaze, still perched at the edge of the chair, trying very hard not to smirk.

"He is my oldest friend."

"Bold of you to consider a man like Halaster a friend," she said, and sipped. She hated whiskey. Gale loved this one, she was aware, but had forgotten where she had gotten the bottle. She remembered what she had stolen in exchange, though.

She felt Gale's gaze drop onto her like a physical weight, and tensed. This was not the moment to discuss the nature of Halaster's impressive yet comprehensively deconstructed mind. She knew that. She knew it, and had said it anyway, which told her more about the state of her nerves than she cared to examine.

"Do not—" Gale began, then stopped. Exhaled. "Just...don't."

He dragged his hand over his face and Celeste noticed the faint tremor in it—the effort of a man restraining himself so completely that the restraint had begun to manifest physically. He was not going to shout. He had decided that before she walked through the door, she suspected, had made himself a promise about it and intended to keep it, which meant this would be worse than shouting in every way that mattered.

Her first instinct had been to drag him to bed and make him forget—a petty tactic, she admitted freely, and one she had employed before with varying degrees of success—but the tremor in his hand told her it would not work tonight. Even the attempt would only make him angrier and confirm precisely what he already believed.

And what he already believed was, she was forced to acknowledge, not entirely wrong.

The realization settled over her with unpleasant clarity as she sat opposite him, her palms growing damp around the glass she didn't want, the bad conscience she had spent years carefully managing making itself known in the particular way it did when there was nowhere left to redirect it.